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Posted June 28, 2011 to photo album "Screen Kisses: From The Kiss to One Day"

The electrifying kiss between Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess) in One Day inspired us to look back at other great screen kisses.

My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

My Beautiful Laundrette was filmed in London in 1985 for less than $850,000 by a group of relative unknowns. Director Stephen Frears had come from TV; the writer, Hanif Kureishi, had never had a screenplay produced; and one of the leads, Daniel Day-Lewis, had only showed up in a bit part in a small film. But the film’s complicated take on race and sexuality got everyone involved international attention and acclaim. The film’s simmering racial and cultural conflicts came to a boil in the kiss between the working-class white boy (played by Day-Lewis) and Pakistani laundry owner Omar (Gordon Warnecke). Some, like the Pakistan Action Committee who protested the film in New York City, complained that the film was "the product of a vile and perverted mind." Others, like Guardian writer Matthew Hays, found that kiss a revelation: “I first watched the scene where Gordon Warnecke, as Omar, and Daniel Day-Lewis, as Johnny, passionately lock lips in the laundrette when I was a teenager. I can speak for the vast majority of gay men of my generation when I say My Beautiful Laundrette was an incredibly liberating moment.”

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